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photo: KEDS (SHOES)
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All Yours
By CHRISTINA BINKLEY
Facebook, Twitter, and other social media are helping clothing brands reach out and touch us right where it counts: in our hungry little egos. Increasingly, brands are inviting consumers inside the design studio for a “D.Y.O.”, or design-your-own, fashion experience. Regular people can create unique Nike and Converse shoes, for instance, and display them in the brand’s galleries, alerting their friends on Twitter Now the shoe maker Keds is taking things a step further—allowing consumers to design their own Keds shoes and then set up stores and sell them—at both retail and wholesale. The program, called Keds Collective, is up and running at Keds.com. The “sweet spot” for Keds Collective is a 24-year-old. People that age “work collectively,” says Keds President Kristin Kohler Burrows. Those who want to sell their Keds designs must pass muster with the brand’s overseers, and they will get about 10% of the revenue—or $6 on a $60 shoe. Stores, too, will be able to order these designs Jeriana San Juan, an assistant costume designer for “Saturday Night Live,” has sold six pairs of Keds with her designs, including an interesting ink-splatter look. “I’m totally thrilled,” she says. “I didn’t expect that people would buy—other than my cousin who I told about it.” THE TRUE RICHES The program involves a “wholesale business-model change” for Keds, says Ms. Kohler Burrows: “Marketing has evolved into a conversation with the consumer.” The shoes don’t permit total customization; the fit is uniform. But the patterns, embellishments, trim, color and other details can be chosen from a palette or, in some cases, uploaded into the factory system. Of course, companies like Keds won’t get richer selling one pair of shoes at a time. Custom products sell at a slight premium over regular items, but they cost more to produce, too. (Prices differ depending on the designs.) But the true riches are in the marketing. Social media can turn those custom sneakers into an advertising medium when the amateur designers proudly holler about them from the rooftops of the Internet. Ms. San Juan, for instance, posted her Keds designs on Facebook and added a Keds link to her Web site. Nike, which owns Nike and Converse, makes this easy by providing a “gallery” of consumers’ designs on its site, as well as convenient icons to click to “share” them on Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. There’s more to come. Scott Kuhlman, founder of the S. Kuhlman men’s clothing stores, is preparing to introduce what he calls “crowd sourcing,” in which consumers will design, post, and yes, market their own shirt designs. Five Four, a maker of youthful menswear, is creating “jeans bars” in two new stores where customers will start with a raw pair of jeans, then choose the wash, rivets and other details for their own custom jeans. “It’s a huge pain, but the way I want to handle the Five Four brand is as a very one-on-one experience,” says designer Andres Izquieta. PART OF THE ADVERTISING The key here is that social media allow regular folk to get personally involved with brands. “People feel much more connected to the brand, because they’re part of the advertising, in reality,” says Darren Paul, co-founder of Night Agency, a social-media-marketing consulting group that worked with Keds on the Collective program. Last year, Night Agency fashioned the Champion Hoodie Remix, in which Champion asked consumers to design hoodies and submit them for votes. When consumers submitted 189,000 hoodie designs, executives were bowled over by the masses of plaid, stripes, dots, vivid colors and embellishments. After passing through Champion’s sieve to ensure that they were brand-appropriate, designs were presented to consumers for voting. The winner, a purple-armed hoodie with a chain-link pattern on the chest and polka-dot pockets, was designed by Jillian Pecoraro, a 24-year-old manager at Hampton Chutney. It sells for $70. Champion is working on an iPhone application for future Remix efforts, which may come monthly or even weekly. “We went into this not knowing how big this was going to be,” says Claire Powel, Champion’s director of brand marketing, “and we realized, wow, this thing is huge.”
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